Telephone call centers represent the front line for customer service, marketing operations, and debt collection for many businesses. Typical call centers receive or make hundreds of telephone calls per day with the aid of automated telephony equipment. For instance, predictive dialers such as the MOSAIX Predictive Dialing System (“PDS”) manufactured by Avaya Incorporated automatically dial outbound telephone calls to contact individuals and then transfer the contacted individuals to agents so the agent can talk with the individual.
Dialing devices such as predictive dialers save time for the agent placing the call because the dialing device and not the agent dials the telephone number and agents' time is not wasted with unanswered calls or answering machines. Predictive dialers also spread the outbound telephone calls evenly among all the agents working from the dialing device so that the agents share the workload equally and no agents sit idle while others have too many telephone calls to place.
Many businesses are increasing their marketing efforts, customer service programs, and bad debt collection efforts by having multiple telephone call centers or multiple dialing devices located at a single call center to serve more customers. Typically, when businesses have multiple call centers, the call centers are located in different geographic locations which makes coordination of dialing strategies difficult.
Thus businesses generally manage call centers individually, with separate staffing, calling strategies, goals, and functions. Generally, a calling list is divided into as many parts as there are call centers or dialers with each call center receiving its own section of the calling list. Although this segmentation distributes work, coordination of strategy for outbound calling is difficult since each call center is responsible for its own section of the calling list and has no knowledge of the other call centers' progression with their own calling lists. For instance, if a call center goes down and cannot make outbound telephone calls, the other call centers cannot typically address the downed call center's calling list goals and priorities because the other call centers do not have access to the calling list including the telephone numbers actually called.
A similar problem occurs with a single call center having multiple dialers. Calling list segmentation typically occurs at a host level, where each dialing device is assigned a portion of the calling list. A host downloads the segmented calling list to the individual dialing devices. If one dialing device fails, the other dialing devices do not know the status of telephone numbers in the failed dialing device's segment.
Another difficulty associated with multiple call centers or single call centers with multiple dialing devices is inefficient use of dialing devices due to small lists of call records. Dialing devices function most efficiently when processing large volumes of accounts in call records and utilizing a certain number of agents. However, accounts are often logically grouped into smaller groups so that the dialing devices are not at an optimal performance level.